Agile is on the rise. The popular software development practice is making its way over to hardware development and companies are adopting it to reap the benefits. This phenomenon has been investigated to some degree and many companies are still trying to figure out if it is a useful way of working for them or not. At the Swedish MedTech company, Elekta, mechanical designers and engineers believe that hardware prototyping could be done better and faster than today. Elekta made an agile transformation to SAFe, which stands for Scaled Agile Framework, a few years ago and the hardware development struggle to match the speed of the development of software. Not much literature is aimed at agile hardware prototyping in particular. In the pursuit of adapting agile hardware development literature particularly to the prototyping process and investigating the actual process at the company, the case study presented in this report was formed. First, to explore the topic, a pre-study of orienting interviews was conducted and was complemented by a literature review. These then made up the basis for a qualitative interview study that consisted of semi-structured interviews with 12 employees at Elekta, as well as 5 employees at 5 other companies for benchmarking. The goals of this thesis project were to make recommendations to Elekta on how to adapt their prototyping process to better fit agile, as well as contribute to the relatively unexplored field of agile hardware prototyping. The case study resulted in a number of identified obstacles and enablers a company might have when implementing agile frameworks for hardware prototyping. Some of the obstacles identified were the difficulty of planning and dividing hardware in smaller tasks, not having in-house production and the difficulty to adapt to an agile mindset and focusing too much on the process of SAFe. Some of the enablers found were modularity, 3D-printing and having in-house capabilities for manufacturing prototypes. A prototyping workshop enables shorter feedback loops, which in turn enables a more agile process. The study also resulted in suggestions to Elekta, mainly concerning setting up a new prototyping workshop solution for the company, to adapt the prototyping process to better fit agile. / Agila arbetssätt blir alltmer populära. Metoderna som härstammar från mjukvaruutveckling spiller nu över till hårdvaruutveckling när företag försöker ta nästa steg mot mer moderna arbetssätt. Agil hårdvaruutveckling har studerats tidigare och många företag försöker fortfarande ta reda på om det är något för dem. På det svenska MedTech-bolaget Elekta tror konstruktörer och andra ingenjörer att hårdvaruprototypande kan gå att göra bättre och snabbare. Elekta införde SAFe, som står för Scaled Agile Framework, för några år sedan men har svårt att utveckla hårdvara lika snabbt som mjukvara. Det finns inte mycket litteratur som specifikt rör agilt hårdvaruprototypande. För att utforska ämnet genomfördes en fallstudie på Elekta. Studien inleddes med orienterande intervjuer som kompletterades av en litteraturstudie om agil hårdvaruutveckling. Dessa lade sedan grunden för den kvalitativa undersökningen som bestod av semistrukturerade intervjuer med 12 personer på Elekta samt 5 personer på andra företag som också hanterar hårdvaruprototypande. Målen med detta examensarbete var att ge Elekta rekommendationer om hur de ska anpassa sin prototypprocess för att bättre passa agila arbetssätt och att kunna bidra till det relativt outforskade ämnet, agilt hårdvaruprototypande. Fallstudien resulterade i identifiering av ett antal hinder och möjligheter som ett företag kan uppleva när de implementerar agila arbetssätt för hårdvaruprototypande. Några exempel på hinder var svårigheter med att planera och dela upp hårdvara i mindre uppgifter, att inte ha produktion in-house och svårigheten med att anamma ett agilt tankesätt istället för att fokusera för mycket på en metod eller struktur. Exempel på möjliggörare var modularitet, 3D-printning och möjligheter till prototyptillverkning in-house. En prototypverkstad tillåter kortare feedback-loopar vilket i sin tur möjliggör en mer agil process. Undersökningen resulterade också i förslag till Elekta, främst i att bygga en ny verkstadslösning för prototyptillverkning för att bättre kunna anpassa prototypandet till agilitet.

Recent advances in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) are placing its own vision, as a platform of interconnected services and devices, at the heart of the smart home concept. This consolidation promises a new wave of innovative products designed in the open, and in which the user takes center stage starting from the very first steps. Therefore, researchers as well as product designers in these increasingly related fields are now tasked with a more complex mission when investigating user behavior. In this thesis we consider rapid prototyping as the upcoming standard process for investigating user interactions in the future smart home. Although past research contributed with several self-contained solutions (built from scratch) to allow such investigations, no accounts were found tackling the problem from our perspective, in which the focus is on how to enable rapid prototyping in an existing proprietary smart home platform by using open standards, software and hardware. To answer this question, we conducted our research with participation of academic researchers and professional designers in the context of an academic and industrial partnership, in an ongoing smart home research project. We used an approach based on the design science research process in combination with the user centered design (UCD) and agile software development methodologies. During this thesis we performed an end to end design process starting from ideation to implementation and evaluation; an architectural blueprint was proposed and a working prototype of our visual smart home rapid prototyping environment (SHRPE) was implemented and tested. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of enabling visual rapid prototyping capabilities in an existing smart home platform, by using the system integration process to introduce available open standards, software and hardware tools into the platform. In addition, evaluation results of user testing confirmed that using UCD to iteratively capture user needs in such complex context is a solid approach.